Witticisms and Boundaries

Witticisms please as long as we keep them within boundaries, but pushed to excess they cause offense. Phaedrus

To outsiders, and that includes most everyone, the Institute for the Advancement of an International Perspective (IAIP) is a dreary European think-tank in a decent Art Noveau house in the neighborhood of Belgisch Park (Dutch for “Belgian Park”), a sub district of district Scheveningen in The Hague, the Netherlands. They have an eccentric collection of academics and probably do something associated with one or another of the international organizations that make the city their home.

To a select few the IAIP is an odd-player in the European security: an agency that has the purported purpose is top take intelligence from a variety of intelligence agencies, meld it with a significant open source intelligence viewpoint, and offer unbiased interpretations. In actuality it seems to go from periods of neglect to being in the hot house. Yet it’s managed to do that since its founding in 1994 totally invisible to the outside world. Whether that is a testimony to its security and well-groomed connections or a result of it being ignored by those it is supposed to serve is difficult, again, for an outsider to know.